News & Commentary

From law schools across the nation, twenty professors of legal ethics today filed a “friend of the court” brief opposing efforts by former Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah and the Family Court magistrates that preside over Truancy Court proceedings, to remove two National ACLU attorneys from a lawsuit challenging the legality of various Truancy Court practices. The defendants have claimed that the exercise of free speech rights by the attorneys, Robin Dahlberg and Yelena Konanova, by holding a press conference to describe their clients’ claims, constituted “reckless professional misconduct,” and that they should not be permitted to appear in the Rhode Island courts. But the law professors’ brief argues that their public comments constituted “core political speech protected by the First Amendment” and were permitted under the Rhode Island Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys. The law professors argued that granting the defendants' motion would unconstitutionally “chill the robust debate necessary for democratic governance.”

The Rhode Island ACLU on Tuesday will ask the FBI to turn over records related to the agency’s collection and use of race and ethnicity data in local communities. According to a 2008 FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about and map so-called “ethnic-oriented” businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations. ACLU affiliate offices across the nation are filing coordinated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on Tuesday to uncover records about this activity from their local FBI field offices.

In response to thousands of pages of discovery documents turned over to ACLU attorneys by the Wyatt Detention Facility, the RI ACLU has today named eight additional defendants, including Memorial Hospital, in its federal lawsuit on behalf of the family of Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng, who died while in the custody of immigration officials at the Central Falls detention center. Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese detainee, died in August 2008 after complaining for months to prison officials about being in excruciating pain. Guards and medical personnel at Wyatt had continually accused Ng of faking his illness and denied him medical care; he was only diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and a broken spine less than a week before he died.

As the result of a new law enacted last month by the General Assembly, the Rhode Island ACLU announced it will be seeking to dismiss two election lawsuits it filed last year – one against the City of Central Falls and the other against East Providence – that have been favorably rendered moot by the law.

Following up on its lawsuit filed two weeks ago on behalf of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island (MPRI), the ACLU is asking a federal judge to temporarily halt the state from distributing to the two major political parties funds contained in a so-called “nonpartisan account” consisting of “donations” made by taxpayers on their tax return. The law authorizing the account excludes independent candidates and new political parties, like MPRI, from any of the disbursement.

The Rhode Island ACLU has today filed suit against the City of Pawtucket, charging city officials with blatantly violating a state law that restricts random drug testing in the workplace.

Claiming that not enough has been done to protect the privacy rights of patients, the Rhode Island ACLU today filed suit against the R.I. Department of Health (DOH), challenging the inadequacy of rules the agency has adopted to implement a centralized database of patient health care records in the state. The Health Information Exchange (HIE), established by legislation (link to bill as enacted) approved by the General Assembly in 2008, will allow medical personnel to routinely access a patient’s entire medical file, including mental health records and other sensitive medical information.

In court papers released today, the ACLU has fired back at attempts by Family Court Chief Judge Jeremiah Jeremiah and the state’s Truancy Court magistrates to remove two National ACLU attorneys from a lawsuit challenging the legality of various Court practices, based on the attorneys’ exercise of their free speech rights. The judges have claimed that National ACLU attorneys Robin Dahlberg and Yelena Konanova engaged in “reckless professional misconduct” by publicly commenting about the lawsuit at the time it was filed, but the ACLU calls the judges’ effort “nothing more than a heavy-handed attempt to stifle the kind of criticism of governmental activities inherent in our democratic system.”

For the second time in little more than a year, the Rhode Island ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island, challenging the constitutionality of a state law that discriminates against new political parties. Calling the law “unfair, inequitable and constitutionally infirm,” the lawsuit, filed today by RI ACLU volunteer attorney Mark Freel, seeks to overturn a statute that allows residents to make a donation on their tax return to political parties through a “nonpartisan account,” but excludes new parties from the disbursement.